[antlr-interest] [v3] Lack of documentation

[Don Caton]

Harald:

It never ceases to amaze me how professional programmers who write code for
a living expect others to do it for free.

I imagine that Ter's motivation for writing Antlr is not money, but
personally, I hope he gets stinking filthy rich from the proceeds of his
book.  If Antlr were a commercial product, he'd probably be making a nice
living out of it. Tools like Antlr are very specialized things, and good
ones can command a hefty price tag.  But instead he's chosen to give it
away.  Some people appreciate that, sadly, others don't.

If I were Ter, I'm not sure my response to you would have been so cordial.
We all need to vent now and then, but I think you owe him an apology.

--
Don


> -----Original Message-----
> From: antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org [mailto:antlr-interest-
> bounces at antlr.org] On Behalf Of Harald Wellmann
> Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2007 6:33 AM
> To: antlr-interest at antlr.org
> Subject: [antlr-interest] [v3] Lack of documentation
> 
> Getting started with ANTLR v3 is a frustrating experience for its
> lack of
> coherent documentation and non-trivial example code.
> 
> I've been using ANTLR since the good old times when it used to be
> called
> PCCTS, and I always used to be fond of it, but I am disappointed with
> v3.
> 
> Marketing-style hype about the latest cool features does not really
> help
> when you get no little or no information on how to use them.
> 
> Even v2 documentatation was a bit scarce, it always cost you some
> trial and
> error to get things right, but this was bliss compared to the
> scattered and
> incomplete bits of documentation you get for v3.
> 
> Yes, I know there's a book now. And no, I don't think it's in the
> spirit of
>  a successful open source project to hide all relevant information in
> a
> book that is only available commercially.
> 
> There's nothing wrong about books, but you can publish a book and
> still
> make the information publicly available, see e.g. the Subversion
> Book.
> 
> By the way, even this mailing list is inaccessible to most people in
> a
> corporate IT environment, as the Mailman Frontend is running on a
> non-standard port 8080 which tends to get blocked by firewalls.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Harald